Be Part Of A Recording at The Gayety with Chuck Jackson and Tyler Yarema

It will be a special event on Thursday Oct 5th when Chuck Jackson and Tyler Yarema record a live CD at The Gayety Theatre in Collingwood. The show starts with a set at eight which will be recorded for the CD, but the party starts much earlier and goes beyond the recording.

Cocktails at 6:30 get you primed for the show with a chance to talk to other concert goers and to Chuck and Tyler while enjoying the music of Jenie Thai (yes, Jenie Thai!).

The second set after the recording will be a big jam with friends of the duo. If you’ve seen the shows that Tyler has directed at Meaford Hall or The Marsh Street Centre, you know how exciting these jams can be. And if you’ve seen any of those shows, you also know that the energy level will be bouncing off the ceiling with the evening’s master of ceremonies, Virgil Scott.

“I think of it as an event rather than just another show,” says Tyler, “It’s a chance for people to be part of something. It’s just going to be a fun show with a lot of audience participation.” That means if you’re loud enough you might end up on the CD too.

Friends for more than twenty years, Tyler and Chuck have been playing as a duo for the past five years or so, while Tyler still has his band The Rhythm and Chuck is still the lead singer and harp player for Downchild. The duo is a way to meet the market demands of live music today.

“The economy has changed a bit,” Tyler says, “It’s getting harder to go out with a full band. Chuck and I can make a lot of noise together.”

They met when Tyler left Thunder Bay to move to Toronto and build a career in music.

“I met Chuck through Gary Kendall, a mutual friend. Gary was the bass player for Downchild and he came from Thunder Bay. Downchild brought me into the fold. I’ve been part of that scene for some time now.”

By being part of that scene, Tyler is referring to two decades of being the go-to piano player gigging with the likes of Jeff Healy, Chris Whitely, King Biscuit Boy, Doug Riley, and of course the Downchild Blues Band.

When the two met, Downchild was already a legendary band, having been the model for Hollywood’s Blues Brothers. Chuck had just joined the band. The quintessential blues singer and frontman, his career started with Cameo Blues Band in 1979. Over the years he’s performed with Bo Diddley, James Cotton, British R&B star Georgie Fame and with Downchild he’s jammed with “The Blues Brothers“; John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. Like Tyler, he’s a “hired gun”, contributing to recordings, TV soundtracks and gigging bands and, like Tyler, he’s picked up a number of JUNOs and Maple Blues Awards along the way. On top of that he’s the Founder & Director of the Tim Horton’s Southside Shuffle, the blues fest that has been the focus of Port Credit’s summer for almost twenty years.

As a duo Chuck and Tyler’s set list includes jazz standards like Fly Me To The Moon and Georgia, R&B classics like My Girl, and Dock Of The Bay, and N’Awlins numbers like Dr. John’sSuch A Night, and Professor Longhair’sMardi Gras In New Orleans.

“We each have our own CD’s,” says Tyler, “but the more we play together, the more people say, ‘What about a record with you two?’” That’s the reason for this special show at The Gayety. “We want the recording to be a good representation of what we do as a duo.”

Two dollars of every $40 ticket goes to the Georgian Triangle Humane Society. The show is sponsored by Adventure Canada, which explains why it’s such a bargain for an evening that starts early and runs late and will keep your blood bubbling until you get back home.